It seems that only as Sharon is dying is the leftist press willing to concede he was a "pragmatist" and, indeed, a moderate. When he was healthy and making policy, he was a roadblock to the roadmap to peace.

The Roadmap to Peace was a sham, but Ariel Sharon did undertake some truly brave and wise actions in making his own genuine roadmap to peace.

Let's review:

Sharon took the politically courageous -- and possbily politically disasterous -- step of evacuating hardcore Jewish settlers from lands that will almost certainly be forfeited entirely to the Palestinians. This decision could easily have brought him down, but it was quite necessary. First of all, these settlements were a huge barrier to peace -- well, not really, as the Palestinians will never accept peace -- so let me rephrase: these settlements were a huge barrier to what the Europeans and US left considered the pathway to peace.

Those nitwits aside, the settlements created military and security problems for the Israelis, as they created targets for the terrorists, requiring the military protecting them, and also the military putting itself in jeopardy to avenge their inevitable killings. Sharon took a brave step in making Israel more militarily defensible. The settlers were the equivalents of peasants setting up their farms right in the midst of the dragons' lairs, but demanding the king's knights protect them and hunt down the dragons whenever one snatched up a virgin. Sharon dragged them kicking and screaming back inside the castle's walls.

Sharon also took the gutsy move of building the very necessary New Berlin Wall Israeli Security Fence, a simple but controversial step that has resulted, controversially of course, in saving Israeli lives from terrorists, which is always seen as a net-negative to the European press.

And he took the prudent move of disentaglement with the Palestinians, retreating back to more defensible ground, giving up a number of security checkpoints within Palestinian areas in favor of more easily controlled checkpoints at the borders of Palestininan areas. Not only did removing some of these internal checkpoints please the Palestinains -- wait, no they didn't, but they should have, were the Palestinians rational -- by letting them travel more freely without constant police intervention, but they put fewer Israeli troops' lives at risk.

Sharon's basic idea was that he could never make peace by negotiation with the Palestinians, so he would make peace unilaterally, by simply making Israel into a more defensible fortress less exposed to the Palestinians' primary peace-negotiation tactic, i.e., murdering Jewish schoolchildren and Jewish pizza-shop customers. If your enemy can't kill you, it hardly matters whether you're at "peace" with him at all. Of course, the Israelis will never be immune from Palestinian terrorism, but they always will face that, whether there is "peace" or not. Reducing terrorism -- reducing mass-murder and mayhem down to manageable, and, ahem, liveable levels -- is the best that can be realistically hoped for, and Sharon moved to make that Israeli policy.

As much of a fan as I am of Benji Netanyahu, I fear that he will undo most of Sharon's smart strategic actions, in favor of making Israel more "aggressive" and expansionist and hence less defensible to terror. I hope that Sharon's legacy will prove difficult to reverse.

And, of course, that they keep building that Wall. Good fences make good neighbors, especially when your actual neighbors are a Murder-Cult whose appetite for blood can never be quenched.